Weekly Review

Colombian military commandos infiltrated a settlement operated by the guerilla group FARC and freed 15 hostages, among them three U.S. contractors and the Colombian-French politician Ingrid Betancourt. President George W. Bush called Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to congratulate him. “What a joyous occasion it must be to know that the plan had worked,” said Bush. “That people who were unjustly held were now free to be with their families.”WhiteHouse.govA federal appeals court ruled that evidence against Hozaifa Parhat, a ChineseMuslim held at Guantanamo Bay for six years, consisted of nothing more than the reassertion of his guilt in three top-secret documents. “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding,” wrote one judge, quoting “The Hunting of the Snark,” “the fact the government has ‘said it thrice’ does not make the allegation true.”CNN.comFormer inmates of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison were suing contractors in four American states for subjecting them to electrical shocks, mock executions, and forced nudity, and the Iraqi government announced that the United States had agreed to strip private security contractors of their legal immunity, though the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad refused to confirm the statement.BreitbartBBCnews.comA survey found that Americans feared terrorist attacks less than at any point since September 11, 2001,CNN.comand President Bush removed Nelson Mandela from the terrorism watchlist.BBCnews.comA poll revealed that a third of Welsh college students believe that a flirtatious or drunk woman is to blame for being raped, and a survey of the National Assembly for Wales found that 3 of the 8 legislators who responded had been raped but had not reported the crime.BBCnews.comIn Australia, where inflation is at a 16-year-high, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry left his post to look after 115 endangered hairy-nosed wombats for five weeks. “I think,” said an opposition politician, “we all love the hairy-nosed wombat.” BBCnews.com

Bozo the Clown and Jesse Helms died, and the new waxwork Hitler at the Berlin Madame Tussauds museum was beheaded.CNN.comBBCNews.comBBCnews.comFifteen boys were killed and 90 hospitalized in Eastern Cape, South Africa, due to botched circumcisions,BBCnews.comOttawa firefighters sprayed children with E. coli-contaminated water to celebrate Canada Day,CBCNews.caand a Dublin, Ohio, man was arrested again for using Saran Wrap to collect and drink little boys’ urine.10TV NewsGoogle co-founder Sergey Brin explained that he had decided to raise his company’s on-site daycare fee to $57,000 a year because he was tired of employees who felt entitled to free “bottled water and M&Ms” (although a spokesman denied that he had said this),NYTimes.comand a judge ruled that Google subsidiary YouTube must provide Viacom, which is suing over copyright claims, with details of the viewing habits of everyone who has logged in and watched a video.BBCNews.comPsychologist Himanshu Tyagi claimed that children raised to use online social networking sites will “put less value on their real world identities” and may be in danger of “impulsive behaviour or even suicide.”BBCnews.comBritishstudies warned that eating junk food during pregnancy might cause lasting damage to the child, and that eating too much tofu could lead to dementia.BBCnews.comBBCnews.comResearchers at Texas A&M’s Fruit and Vegetable Improvement Center found that watermelons have a “Viagra-like effect,” but a researcher in Oklahama pointed out that this benefit may be offset by the melon’s diuretic properties.Associated Press

The Dow Jones Industrial Average officially entered a bear market. The cost of oil surged, and shares of General Motors fell to their lowest price since 1954.Bloomberg.comSpeeding drivers in Holly Springs, Georgia, were paying police a fuel surcharge to cover the price of their pursuit,BBCnews.coma Kentucky woman was arrested after trading sex for a $100 Speedway gas card,Smoking Gunand Nevada brothels were offering customers “double your stimulus” incentives that included $100 gas cards.CNN.comThe United Nations brought female excrement carriers from India to New York City to appear on the catwalk alongside top models at a fashion show, crowning one woman the princess of sanitation workers. “This is the dream coming true of Indian independence hero Gandhi-ji,” said an organizer.BBCnews.comAn unemployed former trucking company owner posing as a federal agent was under investigation after he worked with local police to search homes and make methamphetamine arrests in a Missouri town,NY Timesand a fake priest was caught trying to take confessions in St. Peter’s Basilica.CNN.comIt was reported that a stone tablet inscribed decades before the birth of Jesus described a messiah who would come back to life after three days. “What happens in the New Testament,” said Bible scholar Israel Knohl, “was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”NY TimesThe George Washington Foundation unearthed the founding father’s childhood home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, uncovering slave quarters and a Civil War trench but no cherry tree. “I don’t think we’ll ever find the cherry tree,” an archaeologist said.CNN.comMercury was shrinking,BBCnews.comand Earth, said scientists who study radio waves, is shrieking.Yahoo News

FEATURED ON HARPERS.ORG

America’s Constitution was once celebrated as a radical and successful blueprint for democratic governance, a model for fledgling republics across the world. But decades of political gridlock, electoral corruption, and dysfunction in our system of government have forced scholars, activists, and citizens to question the document’s ability to address the thorniest issues of modern ­political life.

Does the path out of our current era of stalemate, minority rule, and executive abuse require amending the Constitution? Do we need a new constitutional convention to rewrite the document and update it for the twenty-­first century? Should we abolish it entirely?

This spring, Harper’s Magazine invited five lawmakers and scholars to New York University’s law school to consider the constitutional crisis of the twenty-­first century. The event was moderated by Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.

About fifteen years ago, my roommate and I developed a classification system for TV and movies. Each title was slotted into one of four categories: Good-Good; Bad-Good; Good-Bad; Bad-Bad. The first qualifier was qualitative, while the second represented a high-low binary, the title’s aspiration toward capital-A Art or lack thereof.

Some taxonomies were inarguable. The O.C., a Fox series about California rich kids and their beautiful swimming pools, was delightfully Good-Bad. Paul Haggis’s heavy-handed morality play, Crash, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, was gallingly Bad-Good. The films of Francois Truffaut, Good-Good; the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, Bad-Bad.

In a Walmart parking lot in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 2015, a white police officer named Stephen Rankin shot and killed an unarmed, eighteen-­year-­old black man named William Chapman. “This is my second one,” he told a bystander seconds after firing the fatal shots, seemingly in reference to an incident four years earlier, when he had shot and killed another unarmed man, an immigrant from Kazakhstan. Rankin, a Navy veteran, had been arresting Chapman for shoplifting when, he claimed, Chapman charged him in a manner so threatening that he feared for his life, leaving him no option but to shoot to kill—­the standard and almost invariably successful defense for officers when called to account for shooting civilians. Rankin had faced no charges for his earlier killing, but this time, something unexpected happened: Rankin was indicted on a charge of first-­degree murder by Portsmouth’s newly elected chief prosecutor, thirty-­one-year-­old Stephanie Morales. Furthermore, she announced that she would try the case herself, the first time she had ever prosecuted a homicide. “No one could remember us having an actual prosecution for the killing of an unarmed person by the police,” Morales told me. “I got a lot of feedback, a lot of people saying, ‘You shouldn’t try this case. If you don’t win, it may affect your reelection. Let someone else do it.’ ”

I was in Midtown, sitting by a dry fountain, making a list of all the men I’d slept with since my last checkup—doctor’s orders. Afterward, I would head downtown and wait for Quimby at the bar, where there were only alcoholics and the graveyard shift this early. I’d just left the United Nations after a Friday morning session—likely my last. The agenda had included resolutions about a worldwide ban on plastic bags, condemnation of a Slobodan Miloševic statue, sanctions on Israel, and a truth and reconciliation commission in El Salvador. Except for the proclamation opposing the war criminal’s marble replica, everything was thwarted by the United States and a small contingent of its allies. None of this should have surprised me. Some version of these outcomes had been repeating weekly since World War II.

I spent thirty-eight years in prison and have been a free man for just under two. After killing a man named Thomas Allen Fellowes in a drunken, drugged-up fistfight in 1980, when I was nineteen years old, I was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Former California governor Jerry Brown commuted my sentence and I was released in 2017, five days before Christmas. The law in California, like in most states, grants the governor the right to alter sentences. After many years of advocating for the reformation of the prison system into one that encourages rehabilitation, I had my life restored to me.

“Nowadays, most states let just about anybody who wants a concealed-handgun permit have one; in seventeen states, you don’t even have to be a resident. Nobody knows exactly how many Americans carry guns, because not all states release their numbers, and even if they did, not all permit holders carry all the time. But it’s safe to assume that as many as 6 million Americans are walking around with firearms under their clothes.”